Der Unnötige

Georg Stefan Troller's work, stories as well as films, reveals itself as a growing inventory of the present and the presentnesses, as a meandering narrative thread. Observing, perceiving, recording. The archive of the Deutsche Kinemathek holds an extensive collection on Troller's life and work, including unprinted works from the years 1945-1950, from which Troller, together with the editor, selected 16 stories and reportages and supplemented them with some poems he wrote in the same period as the stories. Elsewhere, Georg Stefan Troller has told of his attempts at writing as a youth, of his hunger for reading, which accompanied him throughout his life, of his passion for language in general. Here now, as a late first publication, his first professional run becomes accessible. In these early stories and poems, Troller feels out a language that seemed to have been lost to him for some time. The still young and inexperienced author dispenses with a literary pose. His expression is precise, close to reality and not entwined with garlands of language. For him, observing means, as in his later cinematic work, questioning people. Or also: questioning as observing. The material character of reality is his starting point.